THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS Movie Review

Le Testament d'Orphee

Cocteau's final film is usually compared unfavorably to his masterworks like Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, but this kind of comparison is both unfair and absurd. The Testament of Orpheus is designed as a personal and highly poetic home movie (pointedly subtitled “Don't Ask Me Why”), in which Cocteau, at age 70, looks back at his career and his life, wanders through time, and playfully addresses the crucial importance of art in a chaotic world. The director described the film as “my farewell to the screen…. The events are linked as in a dream, with no logical sequence. My great desire is to live a reality which is truly mine and which is beyond time. Testament is my legacy to the youth of today—the youth in the shadows who helps the poet to bear being misunderstood by the men of his time.” Consider it, then, a kind of artist's sketchpad constructed as a last will and testament, in which Cocteau and his fellow artists and friends (Maria Casarés, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jean Marais, Charles Aznavour, Yul Brynner, and Pablo Picasso among them) pay him tribute as a poet of the cinema, and help him to bid an elegant, amusing, and characteristically esoteric farewell to the screen, to life, and to us. Though he may indeed have been misunderstood by the men of his time, Jean Cocteau's extraordinary films will continue to live so that they may once again work their unique magic on generations yet to come.

NEXT STOP … The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Les Enfants Terribles

1959 80m/B FR Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dermithe, Maria Casares, Francois Perier, Yul Brynner, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Daniel Gelin, Jean Marais, Pablo Picasso, Charles Aznavour; D: Jean Cocteau; W: Jean Cocteau; C: Roland Pointoizeau; M: Georges Auric. VHS HMV, FCT, HEG